Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1220213" data-attributes="member: 5171">Well, KB, allow me to be perfectly in character, as based on our last demi-argument in this forum:  You go.I personally love the series, but it is what it is.  The quickest way to ruin a series for me is to have somebody get my back up by telling me that it's writing on a whole new level, exploring new philosophies, and that if I don't like it, it's only because my brain can't handle anything more complex than popcorn with the training wheels still on.  (Uh, yes, I am annoyed at Matrix people, why do you ask?  And that's just based on my opinions of the first movie, since I voted with my dollars against the other two.)I wouldn't consider this thread a "Please, only say nice things about Martin" zone.  KB's comments are free and justifiable and excellent for purposes of the topic, in my opinion.As I said: I love this series.  I love the fact that he's forcing everyone to grow or die, that he's making people into ambiguous forces over time -- Jaime gets much more sympathetic, as does the Hound, while Catelyn has some hard-hearted aspects to her that put her in the less-than-perfect arena.  That said, if every series were like this one, I think I'd be exhausted, and not in a good way.  It reads as though he's taking the conventions of fantasy and trying to apply an adult-level realism to it -- which means that good people sometimes die, bad people sometimes get to snicker, but eventually, goodness appears to be a good thing and evilness appears to come back and bite you in the butt.Some people really like this.  Some people really don't.  They're both justified.  This is why it's called literature and not mathematics.  I would argue that it's competently written, and that he's doing a good job of (over the course of the first three books) making his characters three-dimensional, and I would state factually that I like it.  But really, that's about all I can say.  I don't know that it's doing new things with the mythology of fantasy.  I see him trying to put a human face on a lot of stereotypes of fantasy -- the spoiled princess, the tomboy, the unathletic little kid, the unloved bastard kid, and so forth.  But I can also see people saying, "Okay, and why is that good?"There's a really obnoxious thread in the SFFNET Tangent forum right now wherein a bunch of literary critics who are much better at being literary critics than they are at writing are bombasting the idea that fiction can only be "great" if it is challenging -- if it attacks the status quo.  Frankly, I think that that's garbage, and that saying that challenging stuff is great and unchallenging stuff is, therefore, not-great, is idiotic.  Some people read to have their minds challenged.  This is a legitimate and good reason to read, but it doesn't make you a better person than the guy who grabs something to escape from his currently unhappy, unfair, unGOOD life into a world where morality is simpler and has much more direct and satisfying paybacks for all involved.So, KB -- fire away.  You'll have to deal with people telling you that you only feel that way because you haven't read the other two books, but that argument didn't convince me to keep reading Jordan, and it shouldn't convince you to keep reading Martin unless you've got a lot of free time over the next few weeks.  I personally think that if you didn't like the first book, you're not going to like the next ones any better.  There's the satisfaction of watching some people I dislike get thrown out windows and watching some people finally grow up and gain some power of their own fate, but there are also some wrenchingly unfortunate, unfair, nasty things that happen to people I had started to care about in a graphic kind of cross between Chaucer and the "Virtuous Heroine in Peril" books of the 17th-18th centuries.</blockquote>

Verification